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1 " Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. "
― George Eliot , Impressions of Theophrastus Such
2 " Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, "
